Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Various Portrait sketches

These are a bunch of portraits and headshots I drew a while ago, while I was goofing around. The ones with the ziptone were done as an homage to the double-lighting thing that Wally Wood used to do so well in pen and ink. I used to look at his stuff for hours, trying to figure out how he did that! In an extra geeky note, I actually made the ziptone myself, with my computer and some transparent sticker paper...something I'll never do again! Its absolutely pointless in this day and age to sit there cutting and triming tone when you got a perfectly good version of photoshop nearby.

9 comments:

DAMN MAN! i admire your initiative. making your own zipatone! i loved the effects it gives you but ALWAYS hated the application process. it's right up there with double sided tape as far as hated art supplies go!

i always liked howard chaykin's crazy use of zipatone myself.

great to see you back on the regular! my fave is the face covered in half shadow. nice mood in that one.

Jason: haha -- yeah, ziptone is a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE process. And homemade ziptone is even stupider -- sticker paper is very, well, sticky...and not at all easy to trim and remove like regular ziptone. If you're contemplating making your own, give it up and just add the tone in pshop. It'll save you hours of frustration. As for my own personal "hated art supplies" -- tops on my list is masking fluid -- totally painful to use, ruins your brushes, and may or may not smear the colours as you rub it off...urgg!

BTW, I loved chaykin's tone stuff too but I thought he did it with Craftint/Duoshade board, which is actually an UTTERLY WONDERFUL medium to work in -- completely spontaneous and fluid.

Anonymous: yup, Gary, I did indeed draw the new cover for Now that's hitting the stands soon. Wow, you're REALLY ahead of the game!

Fantastic, Mike! Love your use of zip-a-tone. A few years ago I did a comic book shaded entirely that way... besides being the most pain in the (insert noun here) medium to work in, it also cost me an arm and a leg. Now that I think about it, just about all the money I ever made on that comic went to pay for the zip-a-tone...

Have any tutorials on how to make your own zip-a-tone patterns in Photoshop?

Anyway, love those head shots. Did you know Brett Warnock from Top Shelf had some (justifiably) nice things to say about you and your work on his blog? (www.topshelfcomix.com , in case you're interested)

Dan: thanks, Dan. Yep, ziptone is pretty annoying all around to use. There's very few old-school tools that I dislike, but ziptone is one of them. As for how to make it yourself, you can buy full-sheet sticker transparent sticker paper at most staples/business depot shops. Then all you have to do is make a sheet of of grey tone in pshop at whatever percentage you want (40% and 20% is best for me), change that up to bitmap at whatever dpi you prefer (bigger is best) and then print it out. Mind you, I STILL DON'T RECOMMEND you doing this. Sticker paper is really sticky, and doesn't come off very easily once applied -- hence, you may end up ripping off parts of your drawing while trying to remove it.

And yeah, Brett at Top Shelf told me about the blog post -- he's a great guy and we met at TCAF recently. Top Shelf is also one of my fav. comic publishers!

Jason: yeah, duoshade is a fav of mine and it really IS fun to use. To me, its like magic watching those lines and patterns appear. However, the activator chemicals smell like poop!

Please note that I do not do accept any private commissions (comic character sketches, family portraits, etc). I also do not sell any prints of my work online. Sketches and prints can usually be purchased at events that I am personally attending. Thanks for your understanding.